Hunting Your Own Meat, Jerky, and Octopi are Aliens

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Have you ever gone hunting? If you eat meat, maybe you should. It's all in today's episode.

Welcome to The Dave Chang Show. I'm here with Christopher Yang. We've got producer David. We're gonna be doing a moif. We'll be inviting a couple of guests to our counter to get their views on hunting. And I'll be serving them some Malaysian pork jerky. If you haven't tried it before, easy recipe, super delicious. And this guy eating it right now. I've never made it before. It is delicious. Anyway, actually, that's not true. I've made it a lot. This episode of The Dave Chang Show is presented by Vrbo Vacation Rentals. People are unpredictable, especially when you travel with them. Someone's in a mood, someone's hungry, someone didn't sleep, something's going to happen. You can't be worrying about your vacation rental too. That's why when you book with Vrbo, Vrbo Care and 24-7 Live Support is built in. So if something's broken, not as described, or just not right, Vrbo is there 24-7 to help. If you know you Vrbo, book today on the Vrbo app. Terms apply. See verbo.com/trust for details. One of the conversations I have quite a bit about cooking. And I've had this for quite a while. I wrote an article for Esquire like 20 years ago about what the future of food would be. And almost everyone agrees it's going to be eating less meat. And that's going to be further from the truth because people are eating more meat than ever before. Not everybody. A lot of people want to. And the conversation I have now as a parent, as someone that owns restaurants, should it be grass-fed? Should it be organic? Should it be whatever?

It's a harder conversation to have because I've said it a lot. I think it's hard to actually morally say that it's good to be a meat eater in today's day and age. I think if I had the integrity and the moral backbone, I probably would give up eating most meat, except for things that you've hunted. And I remember when Zuckerberg like 10 years ago, before he became super tech MMA bro, like the first sort of inkling of that was like, oh, I'm only going to eat what I hunt, but he has his own like nature preserve. He has things that other people clearly don't have. And I remember reading that and being like, that's actually the right approach, but not accessible for anybody. We've talked to Steve Brunel of Meat Eater, and I remember asking him on the pod, I was like, why don't we just hunt more? And he's like, because Americans would kill everything.

We would just obliterate all wildlife.

Over the years, as a restaurant owner, I remember being a craft, and I had not grown up as a hunter. I had grown up with people that hunted on my parents' neighborhood, because we had too many deer, and I grew up eating a lot of venison. Especially at my dad's store, a lot of the sales guys were just bow hunters, and they would take video footage of, like before GoPro and stuff, and they would literally shoot them, shoot deer and videotape, and I'd be like, that's crazy.

But it would come back as delicious jerky, which is one of the reasons why I made a sort of Malaysian, Southeast Asian version of jerky today. And like the whole idea of like animal suffering and getting the best meat, and being involved in as much as I could in the whole process of getting the best kinds of meats. And at the end of the day, I'm always like, it's really hard to argue that you should be eating as much meat as possible if you haven't killed something. And this is a much larger conversation. I can't, nor will we, be the right group to do this.

Chris Ying (4:27)

Probably a couple of interesting things. Like one, do you, I mean, not that many Americans hunt, whether for sport or for meat, but I was just reading this book about how, like in early America, in like the Appalachian Trail, there were billions of pigeons, and we killed all of them, like all of them. We eliminated entire species just because we liked to kill them.

David Chang (4:47)